BBC Focus Magazine

[M Paul Lloyd]

I'm making a point of trying to catch this, looks like it might be fun.

Episode 1 of 3 Duration: 1 hour Sunday 21:00 BBC Two only on England, Scotland, Wales
Right now you're hurtling around the sun at 64,000 miles an hour (100,000 kms an hour). In the next year you'll travel 584 million miles, to end up back where you started.
Presenters Kate Humble and Dr Helen Czerski follow the Earth's voyage around the sun for one complete orbit, to witness the astonishing consequences this journey has for us all.
In this first episode they travel from July to the December solstice, experiencing spectacular weather and the largest tides on Earth. To show how the Earth's orbit affects our lives, Helen jumps out of an aeroplane and Kate briefly becomes the fastest driver on Earth.

More here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01d7kd5

[Nails]

Sounds good.
Thanks for the heads up MPL, my timer is set to record!

[M Paul Lloyd]

Been watching part 2 of this and was interested to learn that the variation in perihelion and aphelion causes an actual temperature shift of some 4 degrees and given that this is at least as much as predicted by CO2 global warming and that we are currently in the middle of a situtaion where the Earth is closest to the Sun on 3rd January, well I'm left wondering just how significant the old, and largely discounted, Milankovitch cycles might actually be in relation to our homeworlds current average temperature ???.